SQLNotes aka InfoQube or IQ forum

Posted by Fredy
Jun 1, 2009 at 11:31 PM

Hi in general, and especially to Jan, Alexander and Pier Paul,

1 )

[off-topic content removed by moderator]

2 )

And I’m always frustrated by my inability to install IQ. Downloading isn’t fast ( 50 KB ) but even then it’s done in less than 4 minutes, and then I get stuck :

C:\InfoQube0.9.24BPortable.zip\sbdll.dll ( this one’s from May 28, so it’s brand-new ) :

Directories ( I didn’t find any install file there ) :

AppData
AppFiles
Controls
icons
Themes

Files here :

InfoQube.exe > “Cannot load language file. Aborting.”
InfoQube.exe.Manifest
InfoQubeClipper.exe
InfoQubeFFExtension.xpi
InfoQubeForUser1.bat
InfoQubeTBExtension.xpi
irun.dll
sbdll.dll

Please help !

3 )

Jan put it perfectly right : We are people who use some outliners in order to get our stuff into a manageable form ; much more than 90 p.c. of pc users don’t even know this kind of program ; thus, the market isn’t large to say the least, and it’s divided into a hundred or so competing programs, hence the trying out of things by their creators doing the marketing themselves.

4 )

But we all know that a 50 dollars licence just for “private” use is worthless since we all do private and business use with our PIM, interwoven in many ways, and a 100 dollar licence per capita seems to be reasonable since Ultra Recall is 90 ; major updates should be 50 dollars. If Pier Pauls insists, 150 dollars is an acceptable max price but which will cost him more money in licences not bought than will bring him money by the additional 50 dollars ; his idea to charge 300 dollars for high-earning users isn’t a good idea since it will de-motivate such corporations to register a genuine licence for every staff member ( see point 7 here ). ( And Pier Paul should consider the prices and the supposed circulation of Ultra Edit and Multi Edit : I’m sure that the latter, by pricing twofold, cut by 10 their possible sales, good quality notwithstanding ; by the way, I use neither but TSE : once you’ve learned a programming language, you stick to it, and NO editor of my knowledge offers real arrays unfortunately… )

5 )

But number 3 here applies to Ultra Recall also, therefore I had to laugh out loud when Jan tells me, perfectly right, to show leniency towards Pier Paul’s marketing try-outs, but tells us he is eager to withdraw Ultra Recall from his computer : Kinook’s faults are marketing faults, and programmers overwhelmed by the negative returns of their marketing openness / na?vet? try to protect themselves and throw out an intelligent but troublesome poster who’s getting to ruin them as they fear : As soon as we consider them ( very good ) programmers who just can’t get much right otherwise, we shouldn’t be any more so much angry with them ?

6 )

Because, let’s face it, for the time being, Ultra Recall seems to be the best “outliner” out there ( except for IQ I don’t know yet ) since it’s ( with IQ ) the only ( ? ) one relying upon a real database, permitting to have ( = to be able to search in ) all our stuff ( 1 GB or more ! ) in ONE ( hoistable ) tree, without speed or crashing problems created by this ( sorry to say this, but MyInfo for example crashed on my system as soon as I tried it out a little bit, not speaking of importing millions and millions of characters into it, and it didn’t allow cloning BETWEEN trees : no problem with that if all your stuff CAN be contained in one tree, but if the limitations of the program architecture force you to split up your things into different trees of “reasonable” size, then the program MUST be able to handle cloning between DIFFERENT trees - hence the interest in the outliner being the front-end to a real database : UR, IQ… ).

7 )

Jan says also that IQ isn’t too easy to use. Very well then, if UR fails ultimately, it’s by this element, and my idea ( here point 4 ) that Pier Paul should consider taking 100 or 150 dollars per user, not 50/150/300, depends on ease of use for the basic functionality : People must PREFER to use IQ to using other software, in order to have it licensed ( be it by their superiors, be it that they buy it themselves ) !

Since this forum is not a perls before swine portal but a real discussion among intelligent, basically well-intended people, and since Jan isn’t alone with his eagerness to promote software he likes and he loves ( and so I understand him and never would insinuate he’s paid for promoting IQ ), it should be possible to help Pier Paul to do it right, GUI-wise, in order for him to avoid such a disaster as UR’s, which isn’t but a GUI disaster, in its widest sense.

You can always offer sophisticated functions, but the basic functions must be available in an easy, comprehensive way : it’s a easy as that. If IQ is easy enough - or will be in a year or so -, Pier Paul will get a lot of press coverage, and by this, a lot of business. There IS a market out there for “another” software, but people, in order to shift to it, it has to be accessible to them.

8 )

On May 29, Jim Hartman of askSam posted in their forum, stating they finally got by the crashing problems of askSam 7 which drove people crazy for more than a year. He’s conservative about their find, fearing users will report more crashes altogether, but I, having been the most unmerciful critic of askSam in the months gone by, would be very happy for him to have finally found THE crashing problem with askSam, since with all its numerous defaults, when askSam will not be crashing any more at least, it will be re-entering the handful of “considerable” softwares, and its programming staff will finally get back to be able to develop its functionality, to overcome its many draw-backs, instead of panick-stricken searching that single line, that single character in their code that made them lose so many ( actual and prospective ) users these last months.

Pier Paul said it about some 2 months ago : Nothing seems to have changed in those years, people were complaining about crashes years ago, and they are still complaining about crashes. Unfortunately, this wasn’t only right, but years ago, there was some crashing, and with version 7, there were loyal users who reported one crash per hour or so ; I wondered what people lately could have done with AS : for working in a corporate environment or except for Pier Paul’s 50 dollars “private license” use, what could have anybody done with it ? One crash per hour is severe masochism, not work !

But if Hartman is right, and they’ve found the devil in AS, AND if at last they implement some better functionality, AS isn’t dying for now, and that would be more than fine !

Here’s the link to Hartman’s post, which was a delight for me to discover :

http://www.asksam.com/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9401 ( near the end )

9 )

Of course, internet page storage problems with AS are rather ridiculous, especially considering that the same people do a “SurfSaver” - but, and here I let out a real secret, perfect work does rely most of the time not upon saving web pages ( because working is upon making choices, not collecting masses ), but upon saving, in straight text ( I always use Arial 10 points ), passages of text of those pages, be it the main text of the page, with the URL, or be it several passages of a page where you’ve got saved some passages already : THIS work must be semi-automated in order to ease your task.

a )

I, at this time, use a macro in the Internet Explorer : ^a, ^c, goto ActionOutline.

There, I do Enter = new item, type its name, then, instead of Enter, a new macro : Enter, go to text ( of the new item ), insert as plain text, go to Internet Explorer, copy the URL, go back to ActionOutline, go to the beginning of the text, insert that URL and a blank line, then go back to Internet Explorer

b )

For a ( first or an only ) text passage ( of a given web page ), the same, but it’s a selected text ( by mouse ), instead of the ^a

c )

For further text passages, of the same page : one click does copy the ( by mouse ) selected passage into the clipboard, go to AO, puts 2 blank lines after the text, puts the text as plain text there, and goes back to the IE.

This way, I get the sources, and I get the relevant passages of those sources, into my texts, where afterwards I put into bold the “relevant passages of the relevant passages”, and I know that with multiple clipboards, I could even simplify my macros, but the important point here is :

Most people succeed in creating almost the same chaos in their working environment on their computer, that they find in the web : Fearing they “miss” something when they don’t get the whole page, they try to store the complete page ( whenever this is necessary, the .mht format is there to help me out ), and by this, they just get a first selection ( “what page is to be stored” ), when they’d get a real information by just copying a relevant ( or several relevant ) passages of that page, which would get them TWO selections, a broad one and a particular one, when the putting to bold text afterwards creates the THIRD selection.

This way, you get ( intermediate ) RESULTS from the web, whereas just storing complete web pages, most of the time, isn’t but fearful, false exhaustiveness NOT giving results - in those times people weren’t online but for minutes, storing complete web pages was understandable : the passage selection had to be done afterwards, offline ; today, it’s a hindrance to your real work - since you HAVE to do that second selection, that selection of relevant passages, but the web page in its entirety is in your way then.

10 )

What I’m saying here is, the perfect storing of all possible web pages is a false task for a PIM / information management system ; it is much more important to easy semi-automate the process of “manual selection” of PARTS of web pages, from your browser into your PIM ; neither in the available softwares, nor in the general discussion this aspect has been reflected.

Sometimes, I need .jpg’s ; the same procedure, except for “copy as such” instead of “copy as plain text”.

Rather often, tables, and this is gross, since with tables I often sit 10, 20 minutes doing work manually. There are tables in web pages that are constructed in a “normal” way, row for row ; not so many problems there when you manually replace spaces with tabs, and of course it would be highly preferable to semi-automatically treat the html code instead ( because there are spaces in the cell texts which should remain spaces, and those spaces between cells that should become tabs ). But there are other tables, created by real sadists, column by column, and there you better re-type all the text manually, field by field ; when having such a pervert table, and you need it absolutely, well, better make a partial screenshot of that table, and insert it as a .jpg !

( Lately, I’m beginning to think I schould write a macro to re-arrange those columns and rows by the source text of those pages : if you have an editor macro to do it, you copy the table from the source text into the editor, run the macro, and have the text by rows THEN by columns, instead of having it by colums THEN by rows ; this rearrangement, be it by program or be it manual, is necessary to store those tables as text. )

I state these table problems because we all face them in real work, and because current software ( of my knowledge ) does not help us with them. IQ should do something I do with texts, for one, AND should help us with tables - with the two sorts of tables !

People who claim that I state the most natural things in the world here, are lying to themselves : 99 p.c. of people today work in a FALSE way, going forth and back between their browser ( be it even integrated in their PIM ) and their working environment ( be it a PIM or MS Word or whatever ), hence the value of my hint.

And yes, there IS the necessity to have clones = cloned items in other ( sub- ) trees, but since in ActionOutline, I am forced to do without them, I discovered some other elements far more important in their influence upon your work efficiency : Yes, you can do without clones ( but it’s no joy ), but you cannot do without a real good arrangement of your micro items in your micro folders ( = sub trees ) and their respective contents, and this costs a LOT of effort, and in all this clones ( i.e. the possibility to create clones ) do not help you whatsoever !

Which is to say, you can overcome the absence of cloning functionality, but you cannot overcome the absence of the necessary time you need in order to work well in your repartition work…

But then, some people try it : by sophisticating the search functionality. And yes, that helps. And yes, that helps even with your storing complete web pages. But all this is groping around. Good search facilities - not those in AO ! - are essential…

but they don’t replace the work YOU are expected to do in order to establish a sort of order in your things, enabling yourself to make the right decisions. ( By storing a max of web pages, people appease themselves but don’t work ; so much for people whining about askSam not storing all possible web pages : it’s laughable, but people complain about this inability much, much more than about those awful crashes… )

11 )

I am wild about putting things into perspective ; hence what I hear about IQ seems overwhelmingly good to me. How can I install that little wonder ?